Sweet things, p.9
Sweet Things, page 9
‘Run!” she shouted.
“Not so fast,” said Melnyk as he reached under the counter and a button buzzed and the door with the pleasant bells locked as if by magic. The girls tugged on the doorknob but it wouldn’t open. Millicent began to cry and pound her fist on the frame. She turned to Karla and shook her, and Karla’s loot dropped to the floor.
“Do you know what diphtheria does?” asked the druggist. “It sorts the good from the bad. The good who die go to heaven where they get to eat all the chocolate bars they want. The bad burn up in fevers and go to hell where their Baby Ruth bars melt into puddles as if they were left in a car with the windows rolled up. I think you should put the bars back.”
Karla looked up at Melnyk. His white coat with his name embroidered on the side without a pocket was unbuttoned and he had a strawberry or rhubarb stain on the front of his shirt. “No, you go to hell.”
The druggist stared at the two girls, especially Millicent, and she felt his eyes burning her soul. Tears welled up in her eyes. “It’s hotter than hell out there,” he said. “Chocolate never does well in the heat. It turns liquid and melts into a horrible mess. So do people who go to hell. Hell has no time, and I don’t have all the time in the world, so we’ll just wait here for your folks to come and find you.”
He reached up to the air conditioning unit over the door, flipped the switch off then sat back down in his chair as the store grew as warm as an oven in the afternoon stillness. The girls stood in the grip of the angry sun as it flowed through the panel the door where the store’s name was painted in reverse letters like a curse in a mystical script, and the heat melted everything it touched including their last shred of nerve.
Karla finally broke. “Did Grover Cleveland’s daughter go to hell?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think she was even caught stealing candy bars, at least not the ones named after her.”
Aces
My brother and I were too young to have been reading about the exploits of the World War One fighter ace, Billy Bishop. The flier had been of our grandfather’s generation, and though the old man never spoke about his own experiences in the trenches, he was incessant about Bishop who he considered a hero.
The famous aviator had risen before dawn on the final morning of his posting to a squadron at the front. Grandpa would point a finger on his left hand at us – he’d lost most of his right hand in the war and wouldn’t talk about how had only a thumb and index finger remaining – and say, “Boys, bravery is doing what you don’t need to do. Billy Bishop didn’t need to get up in the darkest hour that day. He was going back to Blighty at eleven. But instead, he climbed into his cockpit and as the sun came up over the front, he shot up a German aerodrome and registered five kills before calling it a day.”
We asked him if he’d seen Billy Bishop during the war. Grandpa thought for a moment. His eyes darted back and forth. In his mind he was somewhere else, someplace he had not sorted out in his thoughts. Then he nodded. Yes. He’d seen the famous flier. He’d looked up one clear spring morning and witnessed a dogfight above him. That was all the old man would say.
I found a book in the local library. I had just begun to read. My brother would listen as I struggled with the words. Bishop’s autobiography was too old for me, but my brother and I marveled at the passage where the ace recounted how wanted to fly before the war began and built an airplane out of junk wood and orange crates and attempted to glide it off the slanted roof of his boyhood home. We decided we could do the same.
Bishop was lucky. He only broke his leg. In photographs, the great ace is pictured leaning on the wing of his Nieuport scout, and the walking stick he required is either settled on the silver wing or leaned against the fuselage. The week our parents were away in New York, my brother and I figured out how to climb the tree outside our bedroom window, and with a series of ropes hoisted lumber we found by the creek and in the laneway that ran behind the houses on our street.
The war had left our grandfather monodextrous and deaf so the old man was none the wiser to the hammering on the roof. When we’d come inside for dinner, he’d ask my brother and me if we were behaving ourselves and remind us not to stray too far from home.
As our airplane neared completion, my brother went into our mother’s dresser drawer and found a yellow swim cap with rubber daisies garlanding the crown and the swim goggles she’d purchased with the intention of doing lengths at the local YWCA though she never found the time. I wanted my brother to turn the cap inside out when he flew – he had demanded to be the first to have a go and said that if he couldn’t be Billy Bishop he’d be Wilbur Wright to my Orville, though neither of us was sure who had been the first to fly and which one had died when their ‘Kittyhawk’ crashed. I was to give the aircraft its power by pushing it over the shingles and past the eavestrough.
Our grandfather had a habit of getting up in the night and passing our door on the way to the bathroom, and on his return, he’d look in our room and check to make sure we were asleep. We thought we’d timed his trips according to how many cups of tea he’d had before bed, but that night we got it wrong. The sight of our empty beds panicked him.
He’d told us that empty bunks in the Officer’s dugouts signaled who had been killed or missing in action.
He saw our bedroom window open with the cool night air playing in the curtains. My brother had torn his hockey pajamas on a twig that protruded from the tree we used to access the roof, and when Grandpa went to the window he saw my brother fly past as our contraption dove nose-first into the yard. It smashed a wing against the tree on its way down and ejected from the broken wicker lawn chair we’d cut down for a seat.
By the time I scrambled down the tree, my grandfather was already bent over my motionless brother who had a strange smile on his face, not of happiness but of calm.
The old guy was weeping.
He kept asking why. He looked at me with a terrifying and accusatory intensity and muttered something about looking after the little guy and what on earth was I thinking.
Then he began to shake. He crouched in a ball next to my brother and shook.
The sun was coming up on the late summer morning but in the dewy air, I could see my breath. The grass glistened.
The yard was littered with broken lumber and a blue, white, and red roundel we’d painted on a drop cloth we’d found in the garage and wrapped around one of the wings. My brother lay at an awkward angle and the strap of the swim goggles cut into the crown of rubber daisies. He hadn’t listened when I told him to turn the swim cap inside out so he would look like a real ace.
The Boiling Point (A Chronicle of Magpies)
Gwen stared out the window at the blizzard and waited for the courier to come with Maggie’s precious metformin pills. She thought about the trail dogs that once ran to deliver medicine to remote communities such as hers and was reminded of the name of the first encyclopedist. Iditarod. Diderot.
Moving here from the city had been Dave’s idea. The telephone company needed linemen, and they offered to double his pay.
Thin wires of conversation stretched along the old logging roads and hydro clear cuts. She had been playing tin-can telephone with Mags on a morning like this when she received word that Dave had slipped and fallen from a repeater station early the night before. He had lain in the snow through long lonely hours, his cellphone useless because he had shut down the tower to repair it. The weather gradually crept inside him, leaving a starry patch among the snow-laden pines and silence on his phone.
One very cold day when Gwen was eight, her mother put a pot on the stove to boil. She called the girls into the kitchen as steam clouds rose. “Open the back door!” she exclaimed. “I’m going to show you a miracle!” With the door wide open, Gwen had felt the deep chill wrap its arms around her. Her mother took the pot and flung the contents into the air. In an instant, the scalding liquid became snow.
Mags walked into the kitchen in her sleepers. Her face was grey, and her forehead was covered in beads of cold sweat. The mother and daughter exchanged glances that betrayed the fact that both knew, almost instinctively, that the situation was growing direr by the minute.
A pot of hot water that Gwen had put on for tea was mumbling on the stove.
“Let me show you something,” Gwen said, trying to cheer her child. She grabbed the pot from the burner and set it momentarily on the countertop beside the kitchen door. With a push, she was able to force the door over the newly stacked snow that tried to bar her inside the house. Mags approached cautiously as Gwen picked up the pot of steaming water.
“Watch,” she said to the child. “Mommy is going to make magic.” The air, as she breathed in, hardened inside her nose to the point that she could almost feel her head crack. She flung the water into the air above the small porch, and instantly it became a reeling cloud of steam.
Mags gasped and Gwen dropped the pot of water as Dave’s pale shadow appeared in the sudden whir of snowflakes, his hands empty and reaching out to them.
The Old Man (Fictive Dream)
There had been so many fierce tropical storms that year the National Hurricane Center exhausted its alphabetical list of names and by early September they were christening category fives with a new sequence of ABCs. We were living on the coast when Alex passed through after Walter. My wife, kids, and I took refuge in a bedroom closet on the second floor at the back of the house. We believed we were safe until a pine tree crashed through the roof, crushing our bed and dresser, and stranding us for three days high above the ground with the tidal surge swirling around the foundations of our house.
Determined not to get caught on low ground again, we relocated twenty miles inland where we thought we were safe.
But Douglas was different.
The water rose twenty feet above sea level in a matter of hours, and when I put my eye to a knothole in the plywood on the front window I saw waves coursing over our lawn and could smell the salt in it.
We spent the night in the crawl space of the attic. If the water had been six inches higher, we would have drowned as we sheltered in place. Douglas was our last warning. We should have evacuated when we had the chance. The first arm of wind ripped off the shingles and the next arm tore at the decking of the roof. Our children were screaming but the gale force wind drowned out their cries.
Then silence.
It wasn’t the silence of the storm’s eye. That had long passed.
It was the absence of sound that might have greeted Noah when he sent forth the raven from his ark. I pried open the front door. The neighborhood was gone. A heap of broken lumber and the sign for a gas station a mile down the highway was floating in a foot of water where the house across the street once stood.
And there was a man on our front lawn.
He faced down. His arms appeared to be clutching something that had been torn from his embrace. He was still wearing his undershirt. I waded out and covered the lower half of his body with a sheet of shingles and sat down at the edge of what had been our porch to wait for rescuers to arrive.
My wife called me to come in. I told her to go back in the house. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t want her to see the body.
I had switched off the electricity and gas before Douglas hit, but some had not done so. A hydro wire sparked from the one pole left standing on the block. Our rental house was the only structure left standing. We’d been lucky.
People lived here. It wasn’t fair this should happen to them. It wasn’t fair that month after month, year after year, storms kept coming and grew more intense every time they struck.
And what could I do about the man – and old man from the look of him –
sprawled where the storm surge had carried him, perhaps sweeping him from the arms of his wife as they lay together in bed, hoping to ride out the worst of it or clutching his dog, the frightened animal fighting so hard for life it abandoned the old man in his time of need. Or maybe he had fallen from the sky as the eye of the hurricane picked him up and dropped him where he lay. I have heard stories of angels falling from Heaven. They are battered from the wrath of the sky, just like the old man on the lawn. And though I do not believe angels fall unless they are torn from the kingdom of clouds during hurricanes, I accept they can be carried twenty miles inland in the grip of a storm surge.
I wanted to feel for him. I wanted to sit down and weep beside his body and ask why he had let go of what he once held. I wanted to know his name. I wanted him to ask him about his life, how he worked for years, built his own world, did good or bad – neither mattered now – and saw everything he knew and loved shattered in a single night.
Had he been washed all this way inland from the coast? Had he been someone local whose final journey was short? The longer he lay there, motionless and clutching at what he lost, the more he blended with the debris and I was angry at myself for having grown inured to calamity and numb to the consequences of living so recklessly in the world
He was bald and his grey hair was wild and tufted from having been tossed in the surge. He had at least two days of stubble on his face. Had he spent his final hour preparing a futile defense against the blast? Who was he? Someone’s husband? A family’s father just like me or a grandfather, or the elderly uncle who decided to be brave and ride it out?
Both he and I were fools for believing we could stand our ground instead of running for safety. Perhaps he had no means to run or was confused and didn’t know where to go if he did head for safety. We both believed in the brave myth of ‘shelter in place.’ But bravery means nothing to a hurricane. It does not hear our taunts or our shouts or even our anguished cries when we realize we miscalculated our odds of survival.
And soon there would be Edward, after that Felix, and the whiplash of George.
I wondered where I would have ended up had I been in his place with no fight left in my body or soul and let myself become a nameless traveler in the drift and debris with no idea where or when I would arrive at the journey’s end and with no one to greet me there and no way for me to call to them if they were and only silence to tell them who I was.
Happy (Finding the Birds)
My wife and I compete to see who can do the best at the crossword every morning over breakfast. We have two subscriptions to the same newspaper. Breakfast is coffee and a kind of high noon showdown over the breakfast table. Some couples say too little to each other as they begin their days. We say too much. The crosswords are not necessarily crosswords, but they are pointed, barbed, and at times meant to sting, at least in our intonations. I like to think that the morning crossword is a way to get our brains going for the day.
I and my wife were arguing about the word “psithurism,” a Greek word meaning “the sound of wind through trees.”
The word sounds like zither which, perhaps, is a great-grandchild of the Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument played by the wind. I tried to tell her when the word came up that I once lived on the top floor of an apartment building on the Detroit River.
My building’s roof terrace was surrounded by an aluminum rail, but the uprights weren’t locked down properly and when a storm came up, my bedroom was like the inside of a guitar, a sound box, that only served to amplify the music of the balustrade. But before I could even get to the part of the story where I talked about the wind, she shushed me. She never even let me get to the part where the superintendent wanted to have me locked up for wrapping yellow nylon cord around each upright because I said the railing played music all night. That’s when the building management company sealed off the roof to tenant access. P-S-I-T-H-U-R-I-S-M.
First, she said, “Shut up.” That was harsher than usual because on a good day she would put her index finger to her lips like a librarian and on a bad day, she would say, “Be quiet,” in a scolding voice. She added, “I don’t know why you invent words like that,” and as if to assert her superiority had to suffix that statement with her inability to fathom that anyone could attribute any odd piece of jargon to the Greeks because none of the ancient ones were still alive to say otherwise. “That’s why we don’t bother with ancient Greek words today unless we really need them. And we don’t.”
So I said, “Like what?” and she answered, “the philosophy of happiness, eudaimonia. Fourteen down. There. I just gave you one.”
“We don’t think much about happiness. And I already had that, for your information. In fact, our age seems to think that happiness is an overrated experience.”
I was not going to give her the pleasure of winning the point. I’m a bastard first thing in the morning and I will argue a point to death just for the sake of the battle. Happiness is a war that is easy to start and even easier to lose.
She stared at me over her reading glasses.
“Other couples argue about important things – money, children, relatives, the division of chores, shopping, the color of walls and carpet, places to vacation. They argue about responsibilities,” she said. “Every damned morning you’re arguing philology.”
“Well,” I said, to get her goat, “you’re the Classics scholar. Why don’t we argue about happiness? You, of all people, should know these Greek words backward and forwards, and before you say no to the proposition that happiness is overrated here’s why. As a Philosophy professor, I can posit that two academics should never marry. If two parties argue about happiness ad infinitum there can be no reasonable opportunity for them to experience happiness, at least not in a broad, extended sense, and ipso facto at least one should, by virtue of the nature of debate, come out on top. The winner is happy. Maybe not the loser, but at least one person achieves a state of eudaimonia. Therefore, two academics can never be happy arguing the nature of happiness.”
I felt as if I had just won the point when she began to cry.
